Racialized and classed evaluations of human value were central to the decision-making of British colonial and Zionist settler-colonial elites in Mandate Palestine. This paper uses archival sources to examine the eugenicist inflections of British and Zionist demographic anxieties in Mandate Palestine, which were motivated by different agendas and had global precursors and diffractions. Concerns about infant mortality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were linked to class and racial anxieties in metropolitan and colonial settings, and were invariably worked out on women’s bodies and sexual and mothering practices. The paper examines the conditions of the appearance of such eugenicist campaigns in archival records of the Zionist health workers in Mandate Palestine who built a Jewish settler-colonial “homeland.” These projects were eugenicist insofar as they were concerned to increase the birthrates, reduce infant mortality rates, and improve the health of only some children, in this case Jewish. In addition to their racial settler-colonial demographic concerns, Zionist health activists viewed their work as an important element in a competition with Palestinians over racial-national fitness and civilization. British authorities, in turn, frequently expressed concern with higher Palestinian birthrates, which they racialized from early in the occupation. They recognized (and occasionally expressed a calculus) that limited investment in Palestinian welfare and infant, child and maternal healthcare led to substantially higher mortality rates.